Redefining homelessness

Sir, – Dr Rory Hearne provides an excellent example of the social science version of mission creep (“Scale of homelessness crisis is far worse than the official data suggests”, Opinion & Analysis, November 9th). Mission, or feature creep as it is known in the world of producing things, is where the features or scope of a project increase during its development cycle resulting in the completion of the project disappearing beyond the far horizon. It’s how the publicly funded advocacy sector increases job opportunities and funding for itself.

Only a generation ago, most ordinary people understood homelessness to be a term applying to someone who had no place to go and who would otherwise be on the streets except that there was emergency short-term accommodation for them provided in hostels or similar. Then well-intentioned politicians of the left decided that banning bedsits would solve the problem of bedsits not being wholly suitable long-term housing options for many people. Since that time the numbers and demographics of those defined as homeless has closely tracked at or below the previous numbers living in bedsits. The new short-term solution has been to provide them with accommodation in hotels and other short-term private-sector options, with less privacy and autonomy than they had in bedsits and at a higher cost to the State. It was a bad idea, well executed.

Now Dr Hearne wants to redefine homelessness again, not to provide solutions to the causes or homes for people to live in but to expand the size of the problem. He seeks to include people as homeless in his new definition but not in his assessment of previous levels of homelessness. If those who lived in bedsits a generation ago were added to the homeless numbers then, then they’d be pretty close if not higher than the apparent record numbers we have now.

If Dr Hearne’s definition was applied to earlier decades, say, if unmarried people of working age who lived with their parents or those with disabilities who were in unsuitable accommodation, then the times of record homelessness were decades ago. Except Dr Hearne won’t mention that as it doesn’t suit his agenda that everything is worse now. – Yours, etc,